Original title Feux Language French Published in English 1981 Originally published 1936 Page count 214 Country France | Translator Dori Katz Publication date 1936 Pages 214 Publisher Éditions Grasset Published in english 1981 | |
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Marguerite Yourcenar books Coup de Grâce, Oriental Tales, The Abyss, Mishima - ou - La vision du, That Mighty Sculptor - Time | ||
Fires (French: Feux) is a 1936 prose book by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. It consists of aphorisms, prose poetry and fragmentary diary entries alluding to a love story.
Reception
Stephen Koch reviewed the book for The New York Times in 1981, and described it as an "unwritten novel", a type of fragmentary book he compared to works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, Cyril Connolly, and Roland Barthes: "These books insist - on everypage - that they are not novels. They refuse to be novels. Yet through their fragmented alternatives, we still can glimpse the novels they refuse to be - tales otherwise untellable, masked and revealed - for reasons ranging from discretion to despair to a certain visionary breathlessness. ... The unwritten novel among the fantasies and aphorisms of Fires is a classic tale."